The Significance of Scrooge
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” With these words, Charles Dickens led the way in the battle that deploys sentiment and storytelling so unwisely against the common sense essay that Malthus had written.
Common Sense versus Story-telling
Crises like Y2K and the Ozone layer were avoided because alarm bells were sounded and there was political will for concerted action. This is not happening in the case of the ecological crisis. The strength of feeling with regards to pronatalism is drenched in unhelpful sentimentality. Charles Dickens was a master of the sentimental story, and he led the way in the battle against Malthus’ common sense essay.
Thomas Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, which argued that population grows geometrically while food supply grows arithmetically, inevitably leading to poverty, famine, and checks on population (like disease, war, and vice) when resources are outstripped. Malthus did not anticipate modern birth control methods, nor the degree to which food production could be increased by industrial agriculture, nor the environmental consequences of overpopulation, overconsumption, and unwise use of technology (I=PAT).
Malthus highlighted the basic truth that human beings have a constant tendency to expand beyond the point of sustainability, both reproductively and in other ways. That remains a profound basic truth, although it has worked itself out in different ways that are far more complex than Malthus could have anticipated.
Malthus’ ideas were contemporary with Charles Dickens. Dickens was a pronatalist. Dickens’ attitude to the poor’s reproductive issue comes out in The Chimes, where he intensifies his advocacy of early marriage for the poor, effectively urging them to ignore prudent advice, marry while young and tender, and go forth and multiply. In this story he indulges in orgies of sentiment on behalf of a young couple to marry in defiance of advice and start having babies.
The upper and middle classes, in Dickens’ day, frequently delayed marriage, men often not doing so until their early 30s, and then marrying girls in their late teens or early 20s, precisely because they could not afford a stream of babies before attaining economic security. Dickens’ own offspring were numerous but it led him into frequent pressure and difficulties, which increased his impetus for literary production. It led to unhappiness for his wife, who was run down by constant childbearing. The excerpt below is from Wikipedia:
In 1858, when Dickens was 45 and Ellen Ternan 18, divorce would have been scandalous for someone of his fame. After publicly accusing his wife Catherine of not loving their children and suffering from “a mental disorder” — statements that disgusted his contemporaries, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning[132] — Dickens attempted to have Catherine institutionalised.[133] When his scheme failed, they separated. Catherine left, never to see her husband again, taking with her one child. Her sister Georgina, who stayed at Gads Hill, raised the other children.[77]
Charles Dickens’ marital challenges offer an example of the selfishness, and the lack of consideration for quality of life for both women and children that is inherent in pronatalism. Unfortunately, humans are suckers for a sentimental story, and Dickens’ powerful writing succeeded in drowning out the common sense that Malthus was expressing.
There have been other alarm raisers such as Paul Ehrlich with the I=PAT insights and his book ‘The Population Bomb’. It is irrelevant that Professor Paul Ehrlich underestimated the potential of technology and failed to anticipate the agricultural revolution. The fact remains that his basic principle is profoundly true: expanded global ability to feed 8 billion people has only been achieved at punitive environmental cost such as soil and water degradation, pesticide pollution, etc, due to intensive agribusiness farming, overfishing, destruction of rainforest from soya farming, etc. And the Technology factor in I=PAT has intensified overconsumption, and hence our damaging impact on our environment.
Predictions never happen in quite the simplistic way envisaged at the time, but they are not alarmist: the harsh realities that we face today could have been avoided had we attended to the warnings from both Malthus and Paul Ehrlich. Famines and serious malnourishment continues, in ways that could be avoidable but aren’t avoided, for cultural reasons. Population pressure is an indirect driver of ethnic, territorial and resource conflicts which leads to war hotspots and resultant famines.
There are 2–3 billion people facing food insecurity, and yet we still cling to pronatalism, some even believe that we have a moral obligation to reproduce. Whatever happened to our common sense?
Envisioning a Wellbeing Economy
On 9 December 2025 a small group gathered for a little workshop entitled ‘Envisioning a Wellbeing Economy’. The title was a little misleading, for the talk was primarily about the top-level system levers of culture change and paradigm shift. We cannot really begin the envisioning process for a wellbeing economy until the collective mindset acknowledges the following realities:
- Overpopulation and overconsumption
- Acknowledging the need to dismantle the wealth and power hierarchy
- Acknowledging ecosystems collapse and the mass extinction event
The recording of the talk is available at this link and the slides are available at this link.
Global Aspirations
Global aspirations play a key role in human purpose. These are aspirations agreed at the United Nations like the Declaration of Human Rights, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and our International Laws. Humanity is failing to achieve all these worthy goals because we are adhering to cultures that ensure that they cannot be achieved.
We are entrenched in pronatalism and growth economics. We are subservient to the wealth and power hierarchy, even more than we were in Dickens’ day. In the USA the entire political scene is owned by the oligarchs. These dominant cultures compel us to adhere to coercive consumerism and prevent us from choosing a wiser path that would allow us to maximise mitigation from the many man-made ecological crises that we now face.
A Global Aspiration for Eco-equity
To steer humanity into a wiser direction I am suggesting a global aspiration to return within the carrying-capacity of Earth. If you like the idea you can sign the petition. This aspiration would address the omission in the Declaration of Human Rights which ignored the limitations of Earth.